The Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation, edited by Marius R. Busemeyer and Christine Trampusch. Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, 392 pp.,.
The Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation, edited by Marius R. Busemeyer and Christine Trampusch. Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, 392 pp., ISBN 978 0 19 959943 1, £60.00, hardback. Collective skills systems have important economic, political and social consequences. This book will no doubt become a seminal contribution to our understanding of skill formation systems in co-ordinated market economies (CMEs). It is fair to say that the broad aim to ‘explore the historical and political origins’, as well as to ‘explain institutional change in collective skill formation systems’, has certainly been achieved if not exceeded (Busemeyer and Trampusch, pp. 4 and 34). In addition to creating a superior typology of skill regimes and investigating the origins of these systems, the findings of the book are certainly relevant for scholars of labour economics, education, varieties of capitalism and comparative political economy more generally. The starting premise of this study is that skills formation processes should be located in their institutional context. Vocational education and training (VET) crucially interacts with other spheres, such as the welfare state, wage bargaining and industrial relations. Departing from rational choice institutionalism and the varieties of capitalism literature, the contributions to this volume do not conceptualize collective skill formation systems as equilibria. Instead, institutions require political support for their continuity, rather than being self-sustaining and rationally supported by diverse actors seeking efficiency enhancing solutions to collective action problems. Within a historical institutionalist perspective, political struggles among the state, employers and labour determine outcomes — who pays, provides andcontrols VET — at critical junctures along a path-dependent process. Besides providing a state-of-the-art review of the existing literature on skills, this book has several important merits. First, it provides the reader with an in-depth, yet comparative, analysis of the historical evolution of skill systems in different CMEs. More specifically, the first part of the book enriches our empirical knowledge of the historical origins, current institutions and challenges confronting skill formation in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Austria and Denmark. While the chapters on country cases certainly vary in their merits and shortcomings (e.g. in the degree to which they present an explicit analytical framework), they all make novel contributions on their specific country, which have implications that transcend each case study. With respect to the centrality of historical origins, Anderson and Nijhuis’s case study of the Netherlands convincingly demonstrates that the decision to adopt school-based vocational training early on was determinant for the institutional evolution of the skill regime that ensued. Moreover, the chapter on Germany by Thelen and Busemeyer provides new insights on how skill systems evolve. Their analysis reveals that there has been a trend from a collectivist — characterized by broad and portable occupational skills — to a more segmentalist training system. The latter system caters to the interests of large firms, at the detriment of small and medium companies, and results in training being increasingly carried out in internal labour markets. By contrast, Denmark is shown to ‘fulfil, if not exceed, the criteria of a collective training system’, most notably in its provision of portable certified occupational skills achieved by the high commitment of both the state and firms to VET (Nelson, p. 179). A second important merit of the book lies in its introductory chapter by Busemeyer and Trampusch, which successfully manages to pull these diverse, country-specific contributions together under a common analytical framework, by developing an impressive political economy-based model of collective skill formation. Depending on the degree of firm and state involvement in collective skill provision, this model identifies four different regimes (p. 21): liberal (low firm and state involvement), statist (low firm involvement but high public commitment), segmentalist (high firm involvement but low public commitment) and collective (high firm and state involvement). Firm involvement is high where co-ordination is sufficiently high to prevent poaching of trained workers (logic of membership). State involvement is driven by the relation and balance of power among the state, employers and unions (logic of influence). Moreover, the characteristics of each actor are also important. For instance, conflicts within employer or union organizations also determine the extent to which skill regimes are collective. Similarly, as Martin’s chapter on the origins of collective skill formation system shows, the state’s features have a determining impact on both future state commitment to VET and the ability of employers to collectively co-ordinate. For instance, centralization makes it more likely that employer associations will want to operate at the national level, whereas federalism locates policy making at the regional level, which engenders ‘regionally fragmented associations’ (p. 47). Proportional representation similarly matters a great deal for employers’ co-ordination. Indeed, employers faced with little prospects of having a parliamentary majority in government in multiparty systems will find it more rational to promote their agenda by discussing matters directly with workers’ representatives. Last but not the least, a third important strength of this book is its explicit focus on cross-cutting themes, with a second part wholly dedicated to investigating the link between skill systems and higher education (Nikolai and Ebner), gender equality (Estevez-Abe), wage bargaining (Busemeyer and Iversen), and Europeanization (Powell and Trampusch). While these chapters are all valuable in so far as they examine the relevance of training for other important topics in political economy, the rationale for choosing the themes covered could perhaps be made more explicit to the reader. Comparative institutional advantage and the role of partisanship are two themes that are not covered, but would be interesting to investigate given the importance of the former for varieties of capitalism and of the latter for comparative politics. The chapters on wage bargaining and labour market stratification by Busemeyer and Iversen, and on gender by Estevez-Abe, were in my opinion the most rigorous in their treatment, explicitly analysing the impact of VET on other domains, and thereby looking exclusively at collective skill regimes as an independent variable. Importantly, both showed the relevance of training for stratification and inequality, which have become of particular salience in the last two decades. Notwithstanding the fascinating final chapter by Streeck, unpacking and challenging our understanding of skills, the book could have benefited from a more conventional concluding chapter that takes stock on the wealth of insights presented in the book and delineates in more detail further research avenues that stem from them. TIMOTHEE VLANDAS London School of Economics and Political Science
